I’m 24. I graduated in May of 2024 with a double major in Accounting and Finance.
I worked for a year at the FDIC as a Financial Institution Specialist before leaving to start Johnson Ecommerce LLC. For the past year I’ve learned everything I could about AI coding, specifically Claude Code, and I’ve been building with it every day since.
I started this company because I knew AI was going to be central to how software gets built, and I wanted to get ahead of it rather than watch it happen. The finance background isn’t incidental either. A lot of what small businesses actually need built is bookkeeping, reporting, lead tracking and research tooling, and I can read those problems before I write a line of code for them.
The grant model came out of a simpler problem. Small businesses and nonprofits kept telling me they wanted the software and could not justify the line item, which is a budget problem rather than a technology one. Meanwhile there is public and private grant money set aside for exactly this kind of modernization, and a lot of it goes unclaimed every cycle because nobody has the time to chase it.
So I went and learned the funding side the way I learned the building side. Now I do the searching, read the program terms, and write the application, and the award pays for the work. Reading eligibility rules and writing up a project in a funder’s language turns out to be close cousins of the compliance work I did at the FDIC, which is the part of this nobody expects.
What I’m really after is relationships with other small organizations. If an application doesn’t land, that cost is mine and not yours, and you’ll still get my best work on the ones that do, because a half-finished grant project would defeat the entire point.